Earlier this year, one of my fishing partners sent a 1 a.m. message to our group chat. It was a link to an Instagram post of an angler holding a sizable striped bass. Dappled gold and silver with a dozen distinct black lines that stretched from gills to tail, it would have been a gorgeous fish if not for two problems: Striped bass usually have seven stripes, not 12, and men usually have five fingers, not six. The photo, it seemed, was AI-generated.
When the news broke that a co-chair of New York City’s Democratic Socialists of America chapter lives in a $1.5 million Brooklyn townhouse paid for by his father, critics of the DSA had a field day. The New York Post jabbed at Gustavo Gordillo, a 38-year-old former Yale student, for benefiting from his dad’s largesse “while railing against the rich and property ownership.
It is not every day that the laying off of a university bureaucrat generates a torrent of criticism from students, faculty, and alumni. But Jane Rosenzweig was not just any university bureaucrat, and she was not presiding over just any administrative fiefdom. The dismantling of Harvard University’s writing center, and the laying off of Rosenzweig, its director—both announced last month—has been met with outcry shading into outrage.
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Yesterday in London, Jason Arday, the controversy-plagued British academic and author, was found dead. Made famous as the youngest Black professor in Cambridge’s more than 800-year history, Arday had been dogged by weeks of scrutiny amid accusations of plagiarism, fake qualifications, and a fabricated backstory filled with hard-to-believe details.
Yesterday in London, Jason Arday, the controversy-plagued British academic and author, was found dead. Made famous as the youngest Black professor in Cambridge’s more than 800-year history, Arday had been dogged by weeks of scrutiny amid accusations of plagiarism, fake qualifications, and a fabricated backstory filled with hard-to-believe details.
He claimed to have been mute until age 11 and illiterate until 18, disadvantages that did not deter him from getting a Ph.D.
Last week, as rumors swirled about an impending ICE surge that would target the Somali population in Maine, where I live, I called my barbershop to schedule a last-minute appointment. I didn’t want a haircut, but I worried that I needed one. I am a light-skinned Black American: My hair and beard are thick and curly. On Thursday, I had both cut extra short in an effort to look less like someone ICE might find interesting.
Donald Trump returned to office as president in January with both democratic legitimacy and a mandate to accomplish what he’d promised during his campaign. One of his promises was clear, consistent, and unmistakable: to put “America First” by ending our involvement in risky and expensive overseas conflicts.
Photographs by Bieke Depoorter
Walking through her neighborhood in Ghent, Belgium, in 2020, Bieke Depoorter came across a man named Henk, bent over a telescope, gaze trained on the moon. “I realized that I never really look up,” she told me, describing the chance encounter. She found herself intrigued by this man, who was “comforted by the cosmos.
The first time I shot a clay pigeon, it disappeared. I was 12 years old, at a local gun club, where my mother had driven me so I could try my hand at “sporting clays.” Meant to simulate hunting, the sport takes place in forests and fields and involves walking from one station to another to shoot—imagine golf, but with guns. That afternoon, I called “Pull” at the first station, and a disc flashed bright orange across the Pennsylvania sky.
In the lead-up to last night’s vice-presidential debate between J. D. Vance and Tim Walz, CBS’s decision not to have moderators provide live fact-checking became a minor controversy. One pundit argued that this amounted to giving the truth-challenged Vance “license to lie,” and many of the Democratic faithful voiced similar complaints on social media. Mother Jones went so far as to precheck the debate. The X account for the Kamala Harris campaign declared: “JD Vance is going to lie tonight.
Donald Trump raises a fist. Blood streaks his face. The sky is high, blue, and empty except for an American flag caught in a hard wind. A Secret Service agent has her arms around his waist. The former president’s mouth is open, in the middle of a snarled shout. We know from video footage that he is yelling “Fight!,” that the crowd is chanting “USA!”
The photograph, by the Associated Press’s Evan Vucci, became immediately legendary.
They run toward Stonehenge in white shirts. Just Stop Oil is emblazoned on the front, marking them as emissaries of a British climate-activism group. The pair—one of them young, the other older—carry twin orange canisters that emit a cloud of what looks like colored smoke (we later learn it’s dyed corn flour). A bystander in a gray coat and baseball hat chases them, screaming, then grabs the man and tries to pull him away from the historic monument in a failing bid to protect it.
During my first semester of teaching while in grad school, I made a habit of showing up to my classroom half an hour early. I was green as a sapling and felt wholly unqualified for the task before me, and I had the vague sense that arriving before anyone else and looking prepared was one way to earn the respect of students who were barely younger than I was.